Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is a likable fellow and a competent lawyer. He rose from humble Mexican-American origins to join the U.S. Air Force and graduate from Harvard Law School. He has won the trust and friendship of George W. Bush. He wrote 20-some forgettable judicial opinions while on the Texas Supreme Court. And since 2001, he has sat in sphinx-like silence through many high-level meetings on the biggest legal issues facing the nation.

Are these sufficient qualifications for the Supreme Court? I think not. Especially when weighed against Gonzales’s liabilities.

His unpredictability should worry conservatives and liberals alike. Many conservatives have campaigned to dissuade Bush from choosing Gonzales, for fear that he would prove to not be one of them. These fears — and liberals’ hopes — center on abortion and affirmative action. Gonzales’s record on the Texas court can be read as hinting (ambiguously) that he is not especially anti-abortion. And he has applauded racial preferences in high-level appointments and university admissions.

But liberals should not see Gonzales as a safe bet, either to uphold abortion rights or to be moderate overall. "It’s far more likely that the Left will be disappointed in Judge Gonzales than the Right," says Bradford Berenson, a Washington lawyer who worked for him in the White House counsel’s office for two years. "He has been very comfortable serving a conservative president for years. He has consistently chosen to surround himself with conservative colleagues. He has led the president’s effort to appoint conservative judges," Berenson says. "And now, Judge Gonzales has been steeled by more than four years of political combat in Washington, dealing with significant issues of presidential powers and privileges, national security, civil liberties, and more, and has taken conservative positions on all of those issues."

So Gonzales might be a consistent conservative. Or he might not. Nobody knows.

He has not shown outstanding qualities of mind or heart. Some of us might prefer a pragmatic nominee without a fixed ideology — if he or she had displayed deep understanding of the law, outstanding intelligence, independent judgment, fair- mindedness, and wisdom.

But Gonzales has not. He was a journeyman partner in a big Houston law firm before meeting Bush. His Texas Supreme Court opinions are pedestrian and undistinguished. His public statements mix prefabricated talking points with vacuous platitudes. By many accounts, he typically says little or nothing during internal debates and discussions among administration lawyers. Colleagues speak well of his character. But their praise of his abilities is, in most cases, rather faint.

Independent judgment? Bush, who prizes loyalty and bristles when challenged, has said that Gonzales gives him good advice. Might it just be that Gonzales tells Bush what Bush wants to hear? The next time Gonzales testifies on Capitol Hill, senators should ask: Have you ever advised your boss against doing something he wanted to do?

Fair-mindedness? As counsel to then-Gov. Bush of Texas, Gonzales provided confidential memos to Bush on the clemency petitions of more than 50 of the 152 death row inmates who were executed on Bush’s six-year watch. After obtaining copies, Alan Berlow wrote in The Atlantic Monthly two years ago, "Gonzales repeatedly failed to apprise the governor of crucial issues in the cases at hand: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence."

Wisdom?

By pushing unsupportable claims of power, he has weakened the nation and the presidency. Gonzales has helped formulate what even some pro-Bush hawks see as indefensibly grandiose claims of presidential power. These include virtually unlimited powers to incarcerate for years, incommunicado, without meaningful judicial review — and even to torture — anyone in the world whom Bush labels an "enemy combatant." That includes U.S. citizens seized in this country.

Gonzales was the addressee of — and implicitly approved — the infamous now-sort-of-repudiated August 1, 2002, Justice Department memo asserting that Bush could nullify federal law and treaty obligations if he chooses to order wholesale use of torture in wartime interrogations. Bush has not done that. Rather, he has ordered that detainees be treated "humanely." But his subordinates have defended as "humane" a Guanta namo interrogation in which (by the Pentagon’s own account) a detainee was chained to the floor for 18 hours and forced to urinate on himself and bark like a dog.

Gonzales also signed a January 25, 2002, memo to the president arguing that the 1949 Geneva Conventions are partly "obsolete" and should be read as affording no protections at all to any prisoners seized in Afghanistan. He thereby rejected the position of the State Department and of every other president since Harry Truman. Gonzales’s office also produced the sloppily drafted November 2001 Bush order establishing "military commissions" for war-crimes trials of suspected foreign terrorists.

Have such power-grabs been necessary to serve our vital national security interest in capturing, detaining, and extracting intelligence from jihadists — by coercive interrogation, in extreme cases? To the contrary, they have backfired in at least two big ways.

First, the Bush-Gonzales disdain for possibly innocent prisoners’ due process rights and international law protections is seen abroad as having set the stage for some of the abuses in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guanta namo. This has alienated many who could be our allies and has helped sink America’s image to historic lows.

Second, Bush’s extreme positions so alarmed the Supreme Court that it rebuffed him in two June 2004 decisions that a well-advised president probably could have won. The justices gave foreign detainees held overseas (at Guanta namo) unprecedented access to federal courts and rejected, by 8-1, Bush’s refusal to let a U.S. citizen seized in Afghanistan plead his innocence to an independent arbiter. Bush has since suffered a string of defeats in lower federal courts.

He would be ethically disqualified from many big cases. Some conservative Bush supporters warn that a Gonzales nomination would be "folly" because he would likely have to recuse himself "from virtually all the cases that the administration considers of great importance to the nation," as Edward Whelan recently wrote in National Review Online. Whelan, a former Bush Justice Department official, now heads the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

As White House counsel and now attorney general, Gonzales has been a key legal adviser on many of the biggest issues on their way to the Supreme Court. Among many others, these include cases involving national security and civil liberties, USA PATRIOT Act provisions, the federal ban on "partial-birth" abortion (which Gonzales advised Bush to sign), and a physician-assisted suicide case.

Federal law requires that a justice (or judge) disqualify himself in any matter where "he has served in governmental employment and in such capacity participated as counsel [or] adviser … concerning the proceeding or expressed an opinion concerning the merits of the particular case in controversy." This language would fit Gonzales like a glove in many a big case. A broader provision would also require him to disqualify himself "in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned."

His confirmation testimony was evasive and inept. In Senate Judiciary Committee testimony in January on his nomination to be attorney general, Gonzales was especially slippery and unimpressive in dodging questions about the above-mentioned torture memo.

At one point he said, "I don’t recall today whether or not I was in agreement with all of the analysis, but I don’t have a disagreement with the conclusions then reached by the [Justice] Department." Later he said, " I reject that opinion," and, "I am not prepared in this hearing to give you an answer" on whether the president could legally order torture. And he said that while Justice was drafting the memo, he had had "discussions" with Justice "to make sure that we got it right." And that to have questioned whether the completed memo got it right "really would politicize the work of the career professionals at the Department of Justice." (The memo was prepared by political appointees.) And so on, and on.

Gonzales has two big selling points: He would be the first Hispanic-American justice. And he is the president’s buddy. But there are far better-qualified Hispanic-Americans. And in my dictionary, "the giving of political posts to people because of friendship rather than their ability" is called "cronyism" — a practice that, as Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist 76, the Senate should reject.